BUJALSKI LISTS DE PALMA AS AN INFLUENCEDIRECTOR EMPLOYS SPLIT SCREENS IN NEW MOVIE, 'COMPUTER CHESS'

Computer Chess director Andrew Bujalski includes Brian De Palma on a list of his cultural influences, as told to Vulture's Jennifer Vineyard. Here is what Bujalski said about De Palma: "De Palma will spend an hour of the movie whipping you into a frenzy, building the house of cards, and then end the movie gleefully knocking it down in a way that infuriates half the audience but is still commercially viable. And Lord knows I love his split screens. And I finally got to do them in Computer Chess, to put a few split screens in the movie. Not with the level of invention or meticulousness that he brings, but it was fun to pretend that I was De Palma for five minutes."

Computer Chess opened this past Wednesday in New York. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it a "profound, peculiar work of genius."

Armond White writes of the film, "Mumblecore originator Bujalski has found the wit to break out from its conspicuous routines and make the genre’s most stylistically varied, artistically adventurous film with Computer Chess. Bujalski actually employs montage and style–idiosyncratic style–that goes past simply being unHollywood and creates its own uniquely nerd vision."

A. O. Scott of the New York Times calls it "peculiar and sneakily brilliant." And NPR's Ella Taylor writes, "The beguiling Computer Chess is about the dawn — one of many, but that's another story — of the tech revolution. It's also a reminder that you don't need state-of-the-art toys to make a formally playful comedy about man versus machine."